Etta James - Something's Got A Hold On Me (Live)

Etta really works this one. Great band, too. 

Old Blog Quotes

From Spin Easy Time, April 25, 2019: “The 2020 Democratic Presidential Sweepstakes”

Sometimes I read old posts, and I usually find things that I like. I'm inconsistent, but I can turn a good phrase occasionally. 

Re: Cory Booker

“He is a slippery one when question time comes. I know the trick for grabbing an eel in a bucket, but no one seems to know the secret of getting a straight answer out of Cory Booker on a policy question.”

Re: Joe Biden

“Joe's legislative history goes back to 1972, and it's mostly bad. Joe has more negatives than Weegee after a particularly busy night of crime-scene photography in Manhattan.”

Tell Mama ~ Etta James

Tina wasn't the only great singer in the 1960s. 

My Trump Surprise

You may remember that Trump and I grew up in Queens at the same point in history. I mentioned it recently. He grew up rich in southern Queens, Jamaica Estates, while I was growing up in a factory town in northern Queens. I knew Jamaica Estates very well. My family doctor had his office there, in an apartment building that was probably owned by Trump's dad. I attended evening summer school at Jamaica High School one year. That's not quite Jamaica Estates, but it is north of Hillside Avenue. I delivered the mail in Jamaica as a young man. There is a famous early photo of Trump and his dad, standing on an overpass with giant apartment buildings behind them. That was in the early to mid-1970s. I read the accompanying article with interest. After that, Trump was regularly featured in newspaper articles ranging from borderline scandalous, to vaguely positive, to financially embarrassing. We've known a lot about him for a long time.

At some point, around the late 1980s, I believe, I discovered something about Trump that surprised me. He's not a Jew! All early mentions of Trump included details about his father's real estate empire and great wealth. They never mentioned that the family was Presbyterian. I only knew one man who owned a few apartment buildings in Manhattan, and he was a Jew. He was the uncle of a good friend of mine. Based on other reading from newspapers in the 1960s and 1970s, and driven by naivete mostly, I had come to the belief that the big-time real estate business in New York was dominated by Jews. You know, like the Kushner family. Perhaps it was. Fred Trump may have been an exception, for all I know.

I don't think that there was any prejudice in my belief. I have always liked Jews. There were people in my family who were prejudiced against blacks and Puerto Ricans, but I don't recall a bad word spoken about Jews. My own father admired Jews (the family doctor mentioned in the first paragraph was Jewish. He was a first-class family doctor who delivered me and my sister, made house-calls for $5, and took great care of us until he retired). If people needed a lawyer, and in New York you must hire a lawyer to represent you in the purchase of any real property, the odds were great that the lawyer was a Jew. I never heard anyone complain about this. In fact, just the opposite was true. I do remember multiple references like this: “he's so stupid, he hired a Christian lawyer.” My uncle, later in life and on his deathbed, wrote to me, “don't worry about me. My doctor is a Jew from New York. And you know there's only one thing better than a Jewish doctor from New York, and that's two Jewish doctors from New York.” Upon reflection, maybe people were just being careful. No sense in pissing off most of the lawyers and doctors in the world.

My confession is this: I spent the first fifteen years of Trump's public life with the casual belief that he was a Jew.

I discovered my error about the time that Trump was going broke in the casino business in Atlantic City. How can you go broke in the casino business? It began to make sense when I discovered that he wasn't Jewish. “Oh,” I thought, “I see.”

Now put your mask on! Go meditate or something! Buckle up, Buttercup. The next eighteen months are going to be all bad road, all the time.

Ike & Tina Turner - Bold Soul Sister

1969, which might have been an odd year for Ike and Tina. Two things for sure: Ike could still put a great band together, and Tina could still sing up a storm. They opened for the Rolling Stones tour that year, at Madison Square Garden, anyway. The day I was there, anyway. Reading about that tour, the opening acts were rotating through, or just covering part of the geography. The show that I saw was 1) Terry Reid; 2) Ike and Tina Turner; and 3) The Rolling Stones. Great show. 

This riff made the rounds in the late 1960s, as is reflected in the comments on YouTube. But that's music, dear readers. You steal some, they steal some. We're all just trying to make a living. Most musicians understand. 

The Awesome Power Of Chance

Nice article in the Atlantic now about the way that the very fabric of reality can be altered by an insignificant, unseen accident of chance. The article refers back to a movie that took up the theme: someone catches a train at the last second, or they miss the train by one second. Everything changes. This is a subject that is close to my heart.

There was a time when I was working at a part time law clerk job in the west valley while attending school in Malibu. I took a couple of evening classes to accommodate the job. Therefore, for a year or so, I spent a lot of time on Malibu Canyon Road between the 101 Freeway and the Coast Highway. It's a beautiful road, without a lot of traffic at the times that I was using it. That stretch is somewhere between seven and nine miles, I believe. Figure twelve minutes or so. Driving it west, towards the ocean, there's a steep hill running up on your right side, and a deep canyon on your left, with a guardrail but almost no shoulder. Not enough over there to change a tire. I'm thinking of one day in particular, in the late afternoon but with plenty of daylight left and no sun in my eyes. Perfect driving weather; beautiful setting; good driving car (1990 Honda Accord, manual transmission); perfect black-top road surface with no gravel or oil. I was having fun on the sweeping turns, but not overdoing it. Then, without warning, there's never any warning, I almost got zotzed.

I came around a right hand turn in the road and onto a straight piece. There was the mouth of a short tunnel about six hundred yards ahead. I covered part of that distance and then I noticed something out of the corner of my eye, to my right. I moved my eyes to focus on it, and saw that it was a boulder about twice the size of a basketball, and it had just bounced off the sharp hillside on its way down to the road. It was going to beat me to its chosen spot on the road. I just had time to begin to attempt a time and motion calculation, addressing the issue of either braking or accelerating to avoid the boulder hitting my car. While I was performing that mathematics I maintained a constant speed. Almost instantly the boulder struck the road about two car-lengths in front of my bumper and took an impressive bounce. Almost simultaneously, I rolled over the debris spot where it had hit, and out of the left corner of my eye, in the driver's side window, I could see the boulder sailing into the canyon, airborne.

This is what we, growing up in Queens, used to call, “I didn't know whether to shit, piss, or throw up.”

The best way to look at an event like that is to shake your head once, smile, and move on. Don't dwell on it. But I've never been one to leave well enough alone, so I dwelt on it for quite a while. A new math problem presented itself, and I tried to identify the variables. I had covered about two/ thirds of the distance on Malibu Canyon Road, so I had driven about eight minutes at about fifty miles-per-hour, before the rock struck the road. It was a fraction of a second between impact and my passing over the spot, so that number would be in thousandths of a second. How much of an increase in my speed would have brought me to the spot at just the fatal moment? The debris spot was in the center of my lane, which would have put the rock in the center of my windshield if had been traveling microscopically faster. I still shudder to think about it.

The Atlantic article focuses on several pieces of alternate-history fiction, books or movies, that have bearing on our modern day politics. The lesson of the boulder, however, for me, is that every person on earth regularly experiences these near misses. There is a terrible randomness to who lives to see tomorrow and who dies today, and this is our reality every day.

Combat veterans feel this most acutely. They often comment on the randomness of who dies and who lives in the combat zone. Real combat is not like it is in the movies. There is a lot more shooting and a lot less hitting anything. Rifle bullets travel faster than the speed of sound, and the little sonic-booms make a snapping sound when they pass close to you. Many of the combat memoirs that I have read mention the sense of wonder that the man experienced from coming through so much danger untouched, and many wonder why they were unharmed while so many other men, similarly situated, were killed. Usually they chalk it up to just being one of those things. If you're in the right place at the wrong time, you catch one.

So here's to being lucky! Bon chance, mes amis! Just another day in paradise, if you made it through yesterday.

Cloudburst

I was randomly reminded today of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. I love it when that happens. A reference tucked away in a corner of an unrelated article, something like that. And boom! Memory chains, new interests, new things to listen to. What a world! I hate the world, I love the world, and everything else, all at the same time. Very interesting.